Sarah Chilenski

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Pennsylvania State University

Prior research suggests that technical assistance which includes one-on-one, individualized support, guidance, and assistance is necessary to promote high-quality implementation of evidence-based interventions. However, this area lacks measures. This paper uses a mixed methods and community-engaged approach to develop and then evaluate a standardiz...

Substance use-related problems continue to be a national public health crisis despite years of prevention efforts. Community anti-drug coalitions are well positioned to address substance use at local levels. Coalitions often rely on their members to connect to resources they need to address community issues and plan for sustainability over time. Su...

The research-practice gap between evidence-based intervention efficacy and its uptake in real-world contexts remains a central challenge for prevention and implementation science. Providing technical assistance (TA) is considered a crucial support mechanism that can help narrow the gap. However, empirical measurement of TA strategies and their vari...

This study involved a pilot implementation of an evidence based school readiness intervention in new community contexts. The Head Start Research Based, Developmentally Informed (REDI) program was implemented in preschools on and near a Native American reservation with both indigenous and non-indigenous students and teachers. The REDI curriculum inv...

Research suggests that encounters with racism are related to depression in Black youth. However, less is known about how experienced racial discrimination can influence other aspects of well-being among Black youth including their socio-emotional development and behavior. In addition, emerging literature highlights the critical ways anticipated rac...

Evidence in majority White and low-population areas suggest that community prevention systems can create social capital that is needed to support high-quality implementation and sustainability of evidence-based programs. This study expands prior work by asking the question: How does community social capital change during the implementation of a com...

Guided by social learning theory, this longitudinal study examined whether parent-child recurring conflict mediated the association between parental anger management, an understudied antecedent to parent-child recurring conflict, and adolescent deviant and problem-solving behaviors in 415 rural families. Parental use of anger management in 6 th gra...

Developing operationally strong community coalitions is critical to actualizing their potential for public health improvement. The purpose of this study was to measure how substance use prevention coalitions in Mexico functioned across their first 1.5 years, and to test associations between initial community contextual factors and subsequent coalit...

Background Over 5000 community anti-drug coalitions operating in the USA serve as a cornerstone of federal drug prevention. These coalitions, however, have demonstrated effectiveness in preventing substance use only when they use technical assistance (TA) and implement evidence-based programs (EBPs). The absence of TA and EBP implementation by coal...

Prevention Coordinators are the linking agents providing technical assistance between universities and communities in the PROSPER model to support the implementation and sustainability of youth and family programs that have reduced substance abuse in prior research. This study examines the outcomes and trajectory of the frequency of contact of tech...

The Society for Prevention Research (SPR) aims to continually provide relevant professional development training opportunities to advance scientific investigation of ways to improve the health, well-being, and social and educational outcomes of individuals and communities. Our study, led by the Training Needs Assessment Task Force, designed a quant...

The necessity to implement evidence-based programs to support the healthy development of youth and families is becoming part of national policy. Organizations that are not “ready” to do so will likely lose resources, disallowing them to serve as they have set out to do. Consequently, the current survey study draws from a national sample of Cooperat...

Communities That Care (CTC), an evidence-based prevention system, has been installed outside of a research context in over 500 communities worldwide. Yet, its effectiveness in a non-research context is unknown. Using a repeated cross-sectional design with propensity score weighting at the school district-level, the purpose of this study was to exam...

The PROSPER model uses a three-tiered community partnership, university researcher, and Cooperative Extension-based technical assistance system to support the delivery of evidence-based interventions in communities. This study examines the trajectory and predictors of the collaborative relationship between technical assistance providers and communi...

Collaboration with diverse partners is challenging but essential for the implementation of prevention programs and policies. Increased communication with partners from diverse sectors may help community coalitions overcome the challenges that diversity presents. We examined these issues empirically in a study of 17 substance use prevention coalitio...

The present study uses an ecological systems perspective to examine how parental involvement in school-related activities in sixth grade influences early adolescents’ school bonding and academic achievement in eighth grade. Results of multilevel models of multiple data sources (i.e., adolescents, parents, and principals) suggested that parents’ inv...

There is evidence that different indicators of social capital relate to a host of health, socioeconomic, behavioral, and other outcomes at both the individual- and community-levels. This chapter discusses the research and evidence linking social capital to a variety of outcomes. It also examines the degree in which social capital contributes to the...

The large-scale dissemination of evidence-based practices (EBPs) is often hindered by problems with sustaining initiatives past a period of initial grant funding. Communities often have difficulty generating resources needed to sustain and grow their initiatives, resulting in limited public health impact. The PROSPER project, initiated in 2001, pro...

This study examined how participation in a universal family skills-building program may interact with community risks and resources to produce youth outcomes. Prior research has noted community-level variability in risk and protective factors, but thus far no study has examined the role that participation on a community-wide intervention may play i...

Youth's free time is an opportunity for profound development of skills, attitudes and behaviors. Research on this topic has focused on middle class or White communities. The current study, conducted with an urban, low-income sample of 138 African American adolescents, examined associations between parental monitoring, support of autonomy and contro...

Rural communities make up much of America's heartland, yet we know little about their social organization, and how elements of their social organization relate to crime rates. The current study sought to remedy this gap by examining the associations between two measures of social organization - collective efficacy and social trust - with a number o...

Prior theoretical and empirical research suggests that multiple aspects of an organization's context are likely related to a number of factors, from their interest and ability to adopt new programming, to client outcomes. A limited amount of the prior research has taken a more community-wide perspective by examining factors that associate with comm...

In this article, we describe the results of a study designed to assess knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes towards evidence-based and other prevention programs among county Extension educators. We examined differences across educators from the Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) and 4-H Youth Development program areas. Analyses based on a multi-st...

Significant advances have shown that prevention programs can significantly improve social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes of their recipients. High quality implementation of these programs is a critical factor in this process. Yet, consistently achieving high quality implementation continues to be challenging in real-world conditions. This pres...

The current study examined the impact of the PROSPER delivery system for evidence-based prevention programs on multiple indicators of social capital in a rural and semi-rural community sample. Utilizing a randomized blocked design, 317 individuals in 28 communities across two states were interviewed at three time points over the course of 2.5 years...

Mitigation of substance use (SU) disorder (SUD) risk factors is a common goal of prevention. Research has clarified much about risk factors including their prediction of SU/SUD, associations with other etiological variables and mediation of SU outcomes. Greater understanding of the emergence of risk factors themselves may improve prevention. For ex...

This study examined how multiple dimensions and levels of the community context associated with early adolescent problem behaviors in rural communities. Four thousand, five hundred and nine eighth-grade students in 28 rural and small town school districts in two states participated in surveys regarding substance use and delinquency in 2005. Locatio...

Because they often set out with a guarantee of only short-term funding, many community partnerships will face a threat to their sustainability almost as soon as the first money runs out. Research into the factors that enable some coalitions and partnerships to meet the challenge when others fail is limited. This study begins to fill this gap in our...

This study tested the feasibility and utility of developing a multiple-method and multiple-reporter measure that describes the community substance use environment. Data on community-level norms and availability of substances were reported by 5261 students and 181 prevention-focused community leaders (CL) involved in the 28 promoting school–universi...

Considerable research has demonstrated that substance use and delinquency during early adolescence can have long-term negative health consequences. As the correlates of these behaviors cross levels and contexts, it is likely that a social ecological approach will provide insight to inform community prevention. This approach informs the present stud...

This research examines the early development of community teams in a specific university-community partnership project called PROSPER (Spoth et al., Prev Sci 5:31-39, 2004). PROSPER supports local community teams in rural areas and small towns to implement evidence-based programs intended to support positive youth development and reduce early subst...

This study examined the longitudinal predictors of quality of functioning of community prevention teams during the "operations" phase of team development. The 14 community teams were involved in a randomized-trial of a university-community partnership project, PROSPER (Spoth et al., Prevention Science, 5(1): 31-39, 2004b), that implements evidence-...

Both the organizational studies literature and the community psychology literature discuss the importance of readiness when implementing change. Although each area emphasizes different characteristics, several common themes are present within the literature. The current study integrates and applies organizational and community psychology literature...

The full text of the dissertation is available as a Adobe Acrobat .pdf file (263 p.) ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file. Mode of access: World Wide Web. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Pennsylvania State University, 2006.